How do You think. Is Unity engine future of iPhone games? In my opinion it is, a.e. Ravensword was made using this engine and result is stunning. Here are a few videos showing UE's possibilities: One Night Lost Island Follow and fight! Lerpz Mike V Do Or Die Skateboarding
One night: Unity engine will play a part in the future of iPhone games, but I dont think it will play a major part in iphone gaming. Especially now with unreal engine 3. It will be used mostly for indie devs though.
It doesn't because developers had to create WHOLE game, not only single area, let's say 20x20. That's why they had to make some elements worse, to make game bigger, the same more interesting.
It is only Unity Engine test running on PC emulator. But, let's say yes - most of Unity projects may work on iPhone. Author is still designing in details this application, as far as I know.
Unity is primarily a PC game engine. A lot of the better features of Unity are disabled in the iPhone version. Render Textures, shaders, etc. It makes it easy to work with assets (3D models are not trivial to load and animate), but is missing a lot of features that AAA engines have. Unreal 3 may allow for some really amazing games to show up on the iPhone, but probably not ones made by teams of less than 50 people. The great thing about Unity is that anybody with art talent and the proper software can make a great looking game for not a lot of money. Only the last two videos you posted were even shown running on the iPhone. I have serious doubts about how well non-3GS class devices would be able to render those scenes.
Yes, Santa is dead http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=38145 We made Sick of Santa on Unity iPhone and it works really nicely. Performance is a little issue (you have to work hard to get a game running well) but then again, this is a portable device so maybe I'm nitpicking here Unity is definitely my favorite engine!
We used Unity for All Fridges Are Psychotic - very much a 2D game. Performance was still an issue we had to work hard with, though only for the 1st & 2nd generation iPhones. The iPod touch/3GS work fine without any tweaks. The faster portable devices get, the less I see being a problem for a "PC engine".
Pirate Wings, one of my all-time favorite iPhone games, was done with Shiva. Here's a video: I should note that the game was released pre-3Gs; on next gen devices, the game easily runs at 40 fps +.
Touch KO was made in Unity and it's an absolute meh. Worst flop of 2009. btw, Unity Engine can be used for 2D games too like Rasta Monkey.
Also you have Cocos2D which is a 2D engine, great for platformers, puzzles, etc and it's open source.
I'm actually using Unity for a fighting game (see sig), and I find this tool absolutely awesome. Performances are stunning (and still being upgraded by Unity staff), tools intuitive, various scripting languages (nothing can beat .NET C#), supports a ton of target platforms (Xbox & other mobiles soon), is about to support multiplayer advanced functions, got Ageia PhysX, a scriptable editor, and a really user-friendly documentation. Oh, and it's basically free. Which means you can start developping a game for free until you got enough to pay the 400$ iPhone license (and it worthes it). I bought the Pro version, and absolutely don't regret it.
In response to the first post about Unity, the "island" demo is running on the PC, and meant for PC - its got WAAAAAY more polys than an iPhone could handle - otherwise we would have stuff like that too. We pushed the iDevice graphically until it puked, and then backed off a little. You can do a lot of great things with the Unity engine, but you have to be extremely mindful of the iPhone's hardware in order to push out something that looks good. You have to resort to special tricks and magic to get it to show a lot of detail.
